MajinBook: An open catalogue of digital world literature with likes

Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2511.11412

Data documentation: github.com/mazieres/MajinBook

Abstract

MajinBook is an open catalogue designed to facilitate the use of shadow libraries—such as Library Genesis and Z-Library—for computational social science and cultural analytics. By linking metadata from these vast, crowd-sourced archives with structured bibliographic data from Goodreads, we create a high-precision corpus of over 539,000 references to English-language books spanning three centuries, enriched with first publication dates, genres, and popularity metrics like ratings and reviews. Our methodology prioritizes natively digital EPUB files to ensure machine-readable quality, while addressing biases in traditional corpora like HathiTrust, and includes secondary datasets for French, German, and Spanish. We evaluate the linkage strategy for accuracy, release all underlying data openly, and discuss the project's legal permissibility under EU and US frameworks for text and data mining in research.